This has definitely been the single worst HN thread of all time.

Bitcoin has already served it's purpose anyway. It already is a currency that people exchange for goods and other government issued currencies. It doesn't really metter what anyone thinks. Bitcoin has already succeeded. The only question that you need to ask is; Is it something you should invest in?

My personal answer? No. But who cares what I think. It's simply non productive, and frankly non-scientific, to stand up and say "Here's why bitcion is going to fail..." because it doesn't matter, it has already served its purpose.

The CPU cycles are contributing to global warming, and are a means for controlling the rate at which new coins are mined. Unless you have a large dedication to hardware tuning and a decent amount of real money, attempting to mine is of no use unless of course your heater is broken and you need your computer to keep you warm.

How can something be merely anecdotal and empirically evidenced at the same time?

You've misread his comment.

The comparison of his wife and best friend is the anecdote.

He then adds separately that he has empirical evidence--unshared with us--that each is competent in their respective fields.

He doesn't claim anything to be simultaneously an anecdote and empirical evidence.

A good reason why lustig spends much of his talk discussing the chemistry of sugar metabolism.

I find it utterly frustrating that a scientific seeming article would end with this conclusion:

"A single algorithm can trigger false-positive or false-negative results... if something is really real, then it should pass everything."

How you going to be so thorough about detecting a crappy photoshop job and then trip over your own words in the conclusion?

Mostly true 'cept for pythons built in pasta makers:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/

Decorators can be misused, but they can also succinctly express an aspect of the program that is repeated many times in different contexts.

My own rule is that a decorator should do one thing, and that thing should be described by it's name.

Being able to look at a method that has the @has_permission decorator on it and know that it is getting checked for against a package wide permission model is more clear than having boilerplate to check permissions on every method that needs that check.

Any language construct can be misused. And people can hide stupid things in decorators and name them in misleading ways. That doesn't mean that it's the fault of the syntax.

Yeah, that's fun ;-) I wish there was a

    if main:
        ... # do some processing

instead of having to write:

    if __name__ == "__main__":
        ... # do some processing

That'd make DHH happy, too ;-)

I find that the best way to fix this is to write your program as a library, then the part that you're supposed to run as a script which imports and runs it. No __underscore__magic__ required.